Rutger Bregman Quotes

My point of view is that men are basically animals, and I'm okay with that.

Politics is applied biology.

When I think about life on Earth, there should not be a species like us. And if there was, we should be out in the jungle killing each other in small groups. That's what you should expect.

Man is a predatory animal, and this aspect of his nature is nowhere better suited by environment than in the world of politics.

… representatives of those forces which simmer beneath the surface of every civilized community and if they could break out, would destroy not only property and civilization but finally even themselves. .

We must realise that man's nature will remain the same so long as he remains man; that civilisation is but a slight coverlet beneath which the dominant beast sleeps lightly and ever ready to awake. To preserve civilisation, we must deal scientifically with the brute element, using only genuine biological principles.

For once you must try not to shirk the facts: mankind is kept alive by bestial acts.

People are essentially red meat. They are.

I was caught on the freeway for hours when Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans. The entire city had to be evacuated. I observed lives threatened by catastrophes and a whole range of behaviour. What could people do during a crisis?

You and I probably wouldn't be here if our ancestors hadn't been greedy savages.

Apart from anything else, I am designed by evolution, like we all are: if we see a little thing like that, big eyes, tiny nose, we go 'aaah'. That's what evolution does. We are programmed to do that. So to find babies the most amazing, isn't surprising, I don't think.

Our animal origins are constantly lurking behind, even if they are filtered through complicated social evolution.

We are all ruled in what we do by impulses; and these impulses are so organized that our actions in general serve for our self preservation and that of the race.

As humans, we have evolved to compete... it is in our genes, and we love to watch a competition.

There's a common criticism of evolutionary psychology that it's fatalistic and it dooms us to eternal strife, 'Why even try to work toward peace if we're just bloody killer apes and violence is in our genes?'

When I am at a dinner table, I love to ask everybody, 'How long do you think our species might last?' I've read that the average age of a species, of any species, is about two million years. Is it possible we can have an average life span as a species? And do you picture us two million years more or a million and a half years, or 5,000?

Panic is rare, looting is essentially insignificant, people are not terrified and trampling each other to flee from a disaster scene, but in fact are trying to manage a situation. We may in fact revert to some sort of primordial civility.

It is true that we are weak and sick and ugly and quarrelsome but if that is all we ever were, we would millenniums ago have disappeared from the face of the earth.

Evolutionary psychology is one of four sciences that are bringing human nature back into the picture.

People are tough. We're evolved for less food; more exercise; less sleep; less security; more paranoia. The irony is that we're so good at what we do. We strive for more food; less exercise; more sleep; more security; less paranoia - and we've succeeded.

Certain gorillas are more evolved than certain human beings I know.

Evolutionary theory informs our understanding of some frankly inexcusable social behavior and renders it perfectly normal.

Evolution is an indispensable component of any satisfying explanation of our psychology.

Some people would claim that things like love, joy and beauty belong to a different category from science and can't be described in scientific terms, but I think they can now be explained by the theory of evolution.

I can't think of anyone who is up on evolutionary psychology and related areas who is deluded enough to be called a utopian.